My main criticism of this article is that it does not take into consideration the integration required for these systems to function in harmony. My criticism will focus on the parts about AI in the home and providing services for homes.

Since the U.S. is a capitalistic economy, companies lock in competition for market share. Companies use proprietary code written in-house and usually integrate well with their own hardware and systems. Generally these companies release an SDK of some sort. The problem enlies in that while the U.S. continues to be a capitalist economy with antitrust legislation, providers of hardware will have to subscribe to the going system of integration, ex. Amazon Alexa controlling my Phillips lights and not my Emerson stove (One will need a Google Home for that). One cannot expect your everyday consumer to integrate these systems themselves.

While the article envisions a world of perfect harmony where robots drop off packages and clean your house without a word (albeit saying 'top of the morning to you'), real consumers have and will find themselves in a world of twisty-turny compatibility nightmares.

I believe this is the biggest challenge to AI in the home. While having a perfectly integrated home may be the dream of a tech-minded person, the average homeowner will take the path of least resistance. I am surprised that the article does not even mention the word compatibility once!

Summarized, compatibility matters because the average homeowner might acquire conflicting systems. For example, your vacuum might not integrate with your audio system or home theater, so when you are trying to watch a movie your vacuum comes parading through trying to do its good deed. Or, your Roomba which has a perfect map of your house might run into your incompatible mop, sucking water into the Roomba and ruining the motor or gears.

Therefore, I append the policy position to the article that this integration consideration be included. I am not making the argument for some authoritarian centralized repository and standard for inter-communication between systems in the home or service to home industry; rather, I am making int clear this has and will be a great challenge to the prevalence of AI in the U.S.

The article mentions the development of collaborative AI systems that do this work of integration between autonomous systems; however, the legal landscape of the United States protects intellectual property (IP) and any modifications to software to integrate with each other beyond the API exposed intentionally will likely cause reason for suit. Thus, a framework must be build within the legislative environment that fosters the integration of systems and gives companies a framework within which to build the connected home.

I propose explicit legislation requiring companies to expose an API for their connected devices that must use a standard communication framework, ex. a RESTful API over HTTP/S, that other companies can integrate into their connected home solutions. As there are already, I imagine devices using a method such as the OUI component of a MAC address to be discovered on the network and recognized by devices for human interface such as Google Home or Amazon Echo. Abstracting the network level, this would allow less tech-savy consumers to benefit from AI and service systems without having to think about the integration themselves. 
